European Innovation Scoreboard 2017 published

European Innovation Scoreboard 2017 published

On 20 June 2017, the European Commission (EC) published the European Innovation Scoreboard 2017. One of the main findings is that the EU’s innovation performance last year continued to grow, with Sweden remaining the innovation leader, while Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Austria and the UK are the fastest growing innovators.

The EU maintains a performance lead over China, but this lead is decreasing rapidly with China having improved more than seven times faster than the EU. The EU’s performance lead over Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa is considerable.

For China, the trend analysis foresees a strong increase of the relative-to-EU performance from 80.6 this year to 83.9 in two years’ time. Due to this strong increase, the lead of the EU over China is expected to decrease further.

At the global level, the trends observed in recent years can be expected to continue, with the EU catching up with the United States in two years’ time, while the EU’s performance gap towards Japan and South Korea would increase and its lead over China decrease further.

DRAGON-STAR is funded by FP7, aiming to support the Chinese participation in Horizon 2020, the reciprocity originating from the signed EU-China Scientific Cooperation Agreement, the bilateral cooperation in scientific, technological and industrial research and innovation fields, and the ongoing EU - China Innovation Cooperation Dialogue.

DRAGON-STARPLUS follows its predecessor (DRAGON-STAR), in its important mandate to provide support services to European and Chinese researchers and policy makers, and to offer a flexible platform to facilitate policy discussions between European and Chinese stakeholders. The project has received funding under European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under Grant Agreement No645775